Electronic mail, or “e-mail”, has become a popular way for people to communicate using networks of various types such as the Internet. Using e-mail, a person can send messages and other information as attachments electronically to other e-mail users. Such attachments normally include pictures, sound recordings, formatted documents, etc. that are in digital form, and which are executable independent of the opening and reading of the message included with the e-mail.
When using e-mail to communicate, a user will typically create a message using an e-mail program running on a computer that is or can be connected by a network to other computers. The message will include the e-mail address of the intended recipient along with the message and/or attachment. When the user has finished entering the message, the user will “send” the message and/or attachment to the intended recipient. The recipient, also using an e-mail program running on a computer connected to the computer network, can then read the received message and/or attachment.
In the case where the e-mail includes a personalized message from a known person, a recipient is very likely to open and view the message and any attachments. If such attachment is of particular interest, the recipient tends to send such attachment to others who, in turn, do the same. As a result, the attachment may be propagated over the network in a geometric manner, thus incurring widespread exposure.
The recent explosion in the popularity of the Internet has provided tremendous potential for marketing goods and services. However, for most small to mid-sized companies, advertising their wares and services through a web-site on the Internet has not proven to be very effective. One of the difficulties with advertising on the Internet is directing consumers to visit a particular web-site. The overabundance of web-site locations has created an information overload for many consumers.
E-mail is one possible solution for advertisers. Despite its allure, however, promotional e-mail is still frowned upon, and at present its content is generally limited to unformatted text without graphics which is often not personalized. Accordingly, promotional e-mail is often disregarded, and in almost all cases, is not propagated by the recipients themselves.
In efforts to harness the phenomenon of geometric propagation of certain attachments and personalized messages in a manner to solve the foregoing problems, one prior art system employs a web-site where a user may enter a message for being sent to others, and select an attachment. Based on this selection, the message is sent with a URL of the web-site and a code representative of the selected attachment. Upon receipt, the message is displayed along with the URL and the associated code which together may be used to manually return to the web-site. Advertisements are also included on the web-site. The present system is flawed in various aspects, however, since it requires manual intervention to access the attachment. Such complexity, in turn, tends to thwart propagation in the desired geometric manner.